Seven Day Black & White Challenge

I have completed the seven day black and white photo challenge you may have seen going around on Facebook. If you’re not familiar with it, it challenges you to take a black and white photo of your life, once a day, for seven days with no people and no explanation.

At first I felt overwhelmed because I am already busy posting an ingredient of the day for my Preppings website as well as a character everyday for my photo 365 project, so adding another photo to post everyday, even just for a week, might be too much to handle. I put it off for a few days and then decided to jump in and do it.

I ended up really enjoying the challenge because it took me away from what I normally photograph and pushed me to see things differently. I’m usually either in the studio shooting portraits or I’m on the street capturing people for my character of the day project or documenting life going by.

Although the challenge stated “no people”, I couldn’t resist and had a couple of photos that included some elements of people. I made sure that the photos that did have people in them wouldn’t have them as the main subject in the picture. Most of the photos I took were composed when I was either out walking the dog or out shooting street photography in San Francisco. I took a few photos in the studio and I was happy with two of them, one photo of my morning espresso, and one photo of my Friday night martini.

I used this challenge to focus on composition, a subject I wrote about in a previous post. This is something I need to add into my life more frequently because it can make me a better photographer no matter what subjects I’m shooting. Overall it was a great experience and I will be going out once a month for here on out to try to come away with successfully composed black and white photographs.